Welcome to Winding Pathways
Winding Pathways encourages you to create a wonderous yard, whether that yard is an expansive acreage, a suburban lot or a condominium balcony. Go outside and play!
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Prairie Renaissance continued
Catch up on how we are converting lawn to pollinator patches.
Prairie Renaissance – A Review and Preview
What's to Love About a Prairie? We love prairie. Prairie is color. Flowers yellow, red, blue, and every hue in between shine through tall grasses. Prairie beckons flying flowers…...butterflies as well as birds, bunnies, and other interesting animals. Compared to a...
Can You Introduce Kids to Bird Watching in Novel Coronavirus Times?
Can you introduce kids to bird watching and get "outside" during novel coronavirus times? We read a short article written by a diehard baseball fan. She had bought season tickets to her beloved St. Louis Cardinals just before the pandemic hit. When the virus shut...
Refresher On How to Be With COVID-19
With Kathleen Horan, president and CEO of AbbeHealth We are all now several months into coping with the novel coronavirus pandemic and subsequent COVID-19 disease. It’s felt like having to walk across a high wire above Niagara Falls with no safety equipment. That...
Smokey Bear Re-Visited
Smokey Bear is an enduring figure.
How Can You Make Your Home and Yard Safer from Lyme Disease?
Lyme Disease is something you just don’t want. Rich has had it twice. It was no fun, and he was lucky. Nearly as soon as symptoms appeared, he visited our family physician. She prescribed a powerful antibiotic that worked wonders and left him with no lingering...
Why is Sunshine Important?
Sunshine On Our Shoulders, Makes Us Happy! We love John Denver’s famous Sunshine song almost as much as we appreciate sunshine! After a long gloomy winter, the sun finally appeared toward the end of March. We welcomed it into our home and went outside to soak it up....
Do You Know These Two Free Wild Spring Greens?
Our Yards Offer Nutrition Every spring we look forward to eating delicious, free, wild greens that grow in our yard and just about every place people live. Having an ability to identify, pick, prepare, and eat wild foods gives us some comfort in this age of...
Why Do Birds Hit Windows?
*Note: Our assessment of WindowAlert is based on our experiences both from purchasing the company's product and a complimentary set of decals to try. Last fall as Rich was walking along the outside of the Cedar Rapids Public Library and found a tiny dead warbler on...
What Can You do When You are Stuck at Home?
Stuck at home? A tiny microbe is sure changing the lives of people worldwide. Unexpectedly, meetings and schools have closed and transportation is disrupted as uncertainty runs rampant. With every challenge comes an opportunity. We’re sticking close to home at...
Why Do You Come to Winding Pathways?
Like millions of Americans who live in rural or semi-rural areas we don’t have access to a city sewer and rely on our septic tank to safely dispose of waste. We’re lucky at Winding Pathways. Our home is built on an ancient sand dune with steep topography. It’s...
What Do You Do When a Chicken Dies?
Our chickens aren’t really pets. We don’t give them names and every once in a while, we sell or give away a few. Even so, we get attached to our hens as we recognize their individual personalities and enjoy their antics. Maybe it’s silly but we feel sad when one dies....
Crinoids. Forsaken by the Iowa Legislature?
Sometimes blessings spring from catastrophes. That happened years ago when a massive flood inundated Iowa’s Coralville Reservoir. Water overtopped the dam built to control downstream flooding. As the raging river gushed over the emergency overflow spillway it ripped...
How Do You Create Pollinator Patches?
Do you want to plant a successful pollinator patch in your yard? Winding Pathways can help with our step-by-step process and partnerships with county, private and non-profit organizations.
How Do You Tell Animals Apart?
What are some unusually marked animals you have seen?
Where do You find Antler Sheds?
One February morning I took a short work break and walked through the woods near a parking lot and a busy road. I wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking until I stepped on a hard-pointy object. It was a huge deer antler that a buck had recently dropped....